Reviewed by Eric T. Love | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 28.3

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Reviewed by Eric T. Love | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 28.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea. By Richard Kluger. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. xviii + 649 pp. Maps, appendices, index, and bibliography. $35.00 (cloth).

By nearly every measure, Richard Kluger's Seizing Destiny is a big book. This, in part, is because the Pulitzer Prize winner has taken on an enormous topic: five hundred years of American expansion that seized and ultimately incorporated "3.7 million square miles, from the western shore of the Atlantic to the eastern shore of the Bering Strait at the tip of Alaska" (p. xiii). The principal engine of this grand expansion, in Kluger's view, were white Europeans who embraced all the necessary aggressive; individualistic; acquisitive; and, finally, democratic ideologies. After 1500, according to Kluger, these European migrants acted out these irresistible impulses upon an unevenly populated, broad, and fecund continent. The main obstacles to this growth—Native Americans, Mexicans, Spanish, French, and English—were all dismissed as either heathen and uncivilized or as simply on the wrong side of God and history.

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